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UPDATE
IN PRACTICE
FOCUS ON
HELP DESK
Sowing the seeds
Schools in the UK that don’t feel they have enough technology to make a difference may want to think again. The international waves made by Sekese Moliehi, a teacher at Mamoeketsi Government Primary School in Lesotho, southern Africa, started with one single laptop. Julia Dennison caught up with her on a visit to London
I
n 2009, Sekese Moliehi’s life and the life of her pupils was about to change forever. It was the year the teacher and the children at Mamoeketsi Government Primary School in Lesotho would embark on a project using rudimentary tools, like mobile phones and one single laptop, to document indigenous plants. Sounds
simple enough, but this project would make waves in her local community that would carry across Africa and around the world. When I meet up with her at a London hotel in the run-up to Bett, the big London tech show almost feels like an indulgence. If this teacher can make do with such basic technology, do we really need all that Excel had to offer?
A PROJECT THAT WOULD CHANGE THE WORLD Children in Lesotho are required to study the country’s indigenous plants as part of the national curriculum, including being able to identify them and ways they can be conserved. As part of her teacher training, Moliehi was taught to use technology as part of the classroom. She immediately started thinking about how she could integrate the two – except she had no technology to use. So she borrowed a laptop from a friend and encouraged her 80 schoolchildren to use their parents’ mobile phones, go out and look for the indigenous plants they were studying and text her with their findings. They would then upload the pictures to the laptop. “They were very excited because it was their first time to have the opportunity to use cell phones,” remembers Moliehi. “Even in the middle of the night I got messages about their findings. It really
learning of
was an amazing project.” That is, even if they didn’t end up finding as many specimans as they would have liked. Because of the high rates of AIDS in Lesotho, many endangered plants are uprooted and sold as wishful remedies – even though they are protected species. So Moliehi and her pupils decided to start an awareness campaign, creating posters for the local shepherds, who seemed to be the culprits for uprooting the plants, to stop them. “But we didn’t just end up there,” she continues, “we said: ‘Something has to be done. We can’t just create awareness and sit there and think that everything will just change.’” So she took her learners to the biggest botanical garden in Lesotho and lo and behold, the plants were aplenty – and alive and well. “My children were so happy and we decided to make a collection of these species and make our own botanical garden at school,” says Moliehi. “It wasn’t going to be easy for us to make the botanical garden if it wasn’t [for the] technology.” Using phones and the laptop, the school filmed a video of one of the workers at the national gardens with instructions on how to make their own garden, so they would know what to do. “Now we have our own botanical garden at school,” she concludes. The project won Moliehi the Microsoft award for Most
Innovative Teacher in South Africa. She then proceeded to the Pan African Innovative Teacher’s Forum where she again won the Peer Award for being the most innovative teacher. This culminated in the World Forum in which Sekese was nominated Best Innovative Teacher of the Year in the Educators Choice category. In January 2010, Sekese presented a paper on ‘Reimagining education through technology’ at the Learning and Technology World Forum
april 2013 \
www.edexec.co.uk
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